Programmes

We are focused and committed to helping children develop language skills.

Lower Primary

Lower primary school is the first real challenge of students in Singapore. Due to the new challenges they face when entering primary schools, it is recommended that your kid gets lower primary English training to help them be prepared and ready to overcome academic obstacles ahead of them...

PSLE

As parents ourselves, we all want our children to ace the upcoming PSLE this year. We believe that parents’ role is crucial to the academic development of a child. We all do our best to coach or teach them, but in reality, due to our daily work commitments, it is often not enough...
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Lower Secondary

Our lower secondary English training programme will focus on general knowledge, critical thinking, deepening of communication skills, editing common grammatical errors and exam skills. We also impart lifelong knowledge on the application of the skills they learned both at school and in life...

O Level

Our GCE O Level English language Programme for aims to help you, parents, to prepare your child for the obstacles ahead so you and your kid will feel confident when the time comes. Just keep in mind the O level exams are designed to challenge students, not to make them fail. So, don’t worry too much...

LEARNER-DIRECTED APPROACH

We encourage them to explain the concepts taught to their classmates, giving them a chance to cement their own learning.

SUSTAINABLE LEARNING

We engage the learners differently from the way they are used to in school. Thus, they choose to learn, a quality much needed for success in this constantly evolving world.

Structured Feedback

We provide structured feedback at critical junctures so that the learner can jointly work out a game plan for improvement.

SET MILEPOSTS

We break down our learners’ overall goals into bite-size, task-based ones, so as to keep things manageable and make it possible to celebrate small victories - even as our learners work towards achieving their overarching goals.

MEET THE TEAM

We are passionate about languages

Centre Director: Yuen Cheok Hoe

Children start school from as early as two years old and will go through several milestones in their next two decades. When they finally graduate from university, many are startled to find that, in the grand scheme of life, they are in fact taking their first steps. Further compounding this realization is the mismatch between their work expectations and actual workplace situations. Suddenly, the knowledge they have acquired from school doesn’t automatically transfer to their job functions, especially when pre-existing knowledge quickly becomes obsolete in a fast-evolving world.

This is why as specialist educators, we place a premium on equipping our learners with vital lifelong skills for learning and communication, instead of pure knowledge in these areas - because giving our learners fish is not nearly as productive as teaching them to fish.

Since the ability to pick up a language starts to diminish once we hit our teenage years, we focus on honing our learners’ language skills while developing self-sufficiency in language learning. Thus, our methods not only prepare them for school examinations but also equip them for the long haul, to keep pace with changes later on in school and at the workplace eventually.

Language Specialist: Candy Lee

Candy Lee was not always multilingual but believes it’s a blessing in disguise that she had to struggle with learning both English and Chinese. After all, this is why she now has deep empathy for language learners and firsthand knowledge of how some textbook techniques work only in theory.

Determined to plug such gaps and introduce a practical dimension to language learning, Candy developed her own methodology to more effectively bring up the language proficiency of her adult learners.

She’s certainly on to something because her methods have not just borne fruit but have also made her a successful business developer - one who’s built a string of language schools focusing on high-quality small group classes.

Having already succeeded with adult learners, Candy plans to use her methods to help learners like her younger self gain language proficiency more easily than she herself did. In fact, it’s her hope that her methodology can make language learning much more fun and effective for them - so that the difficulties her younger self endured would have at least been worth it!

Language Specialist: Gerard James Ortega

English is a crucial examinable subject and determines whether or not a child can proceed to the next level. Since English is widely spoken globally, it will continue to figure prominently in the child’s adult life. Thus, it makes sense to cultivate a lifelong liking for it early on.

Our children may complain about language learning when faced with setbacks in school such as their efforts seemingly not paying off. While it’s true that we can more easily drill maths and science into our children, this method doesn’t work equally for languages. In contrast, there are specialist ways to approach English language learning, for example, acquiring the ability to write suitably, to speed-read for gist and to work out word meanings contextually.

English First has a deep understanding of language learning and believes that success is anchored in three aspects: learning about the nature of the language, identifying its relevance to our lives and cultivating a liking for it. To help the learners and teachers achieve their language goals, we have created four pillars that work towards building a much-needed strong foundation while developing overall language proficiency.